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Winner of the SCBWI Golden Kite Award for Illustrated Books for Older ReadersA Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2020A New York Times Best Children's Book of 2020Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2020Booklist Best Books of 2020Horn Book Fanfare 2020 BooklistChicago Public Library Best of the Best 2020Jewish Journal Twenty of the Best 2020 (Non-Holiday) Jewish Books for KidsA National Jewish Book Award 2020 Finalist for Middle Grade FictionA 2021 Golden Dome Book Award Selection
"Harrowing, engaging and utterly honest." -Elizabeth Wein, The New York Times Book Review"A captivating chronicle of eight turbulent years." -The Wall Street JournalFrom a beloved voice in children's literature comes this landmark memoir of hope amid harrowing times and an engaging and unusual Holocaust story.With backlist sales of over 2.3 million copies, Uri Shulevitz, one of Farrar, Straus and Grioux's most acclaimed picture-book creators, details the eight-year odyssey of how he and his Jewish family escaped the terrors of the Nazis by fleeing Warsaw for the Soviet Union in
Chance.
It was during those years, with threats at every turn, that the young Uri experienced his awakening as an artist, an experience that played a key role during this difficult time. By turns dreamlike and nightmarish, this heavily illustrated account of determination, courage, family loyalty, and the luck of coincidence is a true publishing event.
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Uri Shulevitz (1935-2025) was a Caldecott Medal-winning illustrator and author. He was born in Warsaw, Poland, on February 27, 1935. He began drawing at the age of three and, unlike many children, never stopped. The Warsaw blitz occurred when he was four years old, and the Shulevitz family fled, as chronicled in his acclaimed memoir
Chance: Escape from the Holocaust. For eight years they were wanderers, arriving, eventually, in Paris in 1947. There Shulevitz developed an enthusiasm for French comic books, and soon he and a friend started making their own. At thirteen, Shulevitz won first prize in an all-elementary-school drawing competition in Paris's 20th district. In 1949, the family moved to Israel, where Shulevitz worked a variety of jobs: an apprentice at a rubber-stamp shop, a carpenter, and a dog-license clerk at Tel Aviv City Hall. He studied at the Teachers' Institute in Tel Aviv, where he took courses in literature, anatomy, and biology, and also studied at the Art Institute of Tel Aviv. At fifteen, he was the youngest to exhibit in a group drawing show at the Tel Aviv Museum. At 24 he moved to New York City, where he studied painting at Brooklyn Museum Art School and drew illustrations for a publisher of Hebrew books. One day while talking on the telephone, he noticed that his doodles had a fresh and spontaneous look-different from his previous illustrations. This discovery was the beginning of Uri's new approach to his illustrations for
The Moon in My Room, his first book, published in 1963. Since then he has written and illustrated many celebrated children's books. He won the Caldecott Medal for
The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship, written by Arthur Ransome. He has also earned three Caldecott Honors, for
The Treasure,
Snow and
How I Learned Geography. His other books include
One Monday Morning,
Dawn,
So Sleepy Story and many others. He also wrote the instructional guide
Writing with Pictures: How to Write and Illustrate Children's Books. Shulevitz's final book, completed shortly before his death in New York City at age eighty-nine, is
The Sky Was My Blanket: A Young Man's Journey Across Wartime Europe, a narrative nonfiction account of the adventures of his father's brother Yehiel, who ran away from home at age fifteen, journeyed through prewar Europe for a decade, and ended up a member of the Spanish Republican Army and then the Jewish Resistance in Vichy France.
